Cutting Light and Dark Holes, like Overlapping Planes, works with the flatness of the film plane against the spatial depth of a situation. The film, entirely in negative image, begins with a black sheet of paper filling the frame. Haxton enters from the left and cuts four rectangles in the paper, two on the left and two on the right, leaving four white rectangles. He then removes the black sheet by rolling it off from left to right, revealing four black rectangles underneath, cut out of a sheet of white paper. He rolls this paper from left to right,leaving the frame black again. The surface looks identical to the black frame at the beginning of the film: as in Overlapping Planes, there is no way of differentiating between the appearances of flatness without signs of activity within the space.